CSotD: Enlightenment as a competitive sport
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Betty and Alex have spent the week at a coffeeshop fussing over this zen garden. You rarely know how much real-time time is being depicted in a story arc, but I'd say finding enlightenment in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee is about par for the course.
Any deep moral teachings that take more time to absorb than that probably aren't worth it anyway.
I saw a car with a vanity plate that said "Namaste."
I thought it was right in the spirit. Do you suppose that, in Tibet, they sell "humility plates"? You buy them, but then you don't put them on the car.
This whole business of spiritual enlightenment seems based on the concept that spiritual things are weird and so you have to look elsewhere to find them because, of course, we are living the default.
When I was in college, one of our professors brought a Navajo holyman to campus. There were several people in our circle who felt a particular kinship with Indians, largely based on having tripped on organic mescaline, but this fellow wasn't buying any of that and asked why we would try to embrace the religion of another culture when there was so much richness within our own spiritual tradition that we had not taken the time to explore and that would be so much more culturally accessible to us?
It's a question that has stuck with me, in large part because it keeps resurfacing in various forms.
In "Lancer at Large," the spiritually focused 1936 follow-up to his more famous "Lives of a Bengal Lancer," Francis Yeats Brown notes that the people of India were, at the time at least, living roughly the same lives portrayed in their holy books.
As a result, when they heard the stories of Krishna, Ganesh and the others, the small details and the metaphors were immediately relevant to their own daily lives and only the spiritual elements remained to be absorbed.
By contrast, he suggested, it is difficult for someone living in 20th Century Britain to truly understand metaphorical references to deserts and to water intended for people in the Middle East of two millennia ago.
When we begin with that distance between our spiritual sources and ourselves, it's easy to isolate the Biblical world of sheep and sandals and togas to an hour on Sunday morning, and to keep its ethical and moral teachings equally quarantined.
"We repeat the rich, rolling phrases of the prophets of Palestine, without giving them literal credence; and hence we tend to similar hyperbole in our worldly affairs," he wrote.
Besides, spiritual enlightenment is hard enough even when you are working within the familiar boundaries of your own culture, as taught in one of my favorite passages from the Analects:
Tzu-kung said, What I do not want others to do to me, I have no desire to do to others. The Master said, Oh Ssu! You have not quite got to that point yet.
I came across one translation that suggested a gentle chuckle in the Master's rebuke, and perhaps someone reading it in the original Chinese would see that, but even the more sparse and literal rendering suggests a man of patience and humor but also of unbending principle.
It's not hard to picture him shaking his head over a student whose eagerness so outpaces his achievement, and who possesses, over the centuries, such a spiritual kinship with competitive zen gardeners and people who would put "Namaste" on their vanity plates.
Then again, it's also not hard to picture him shaking his head over head-shakers.
The Master said, In the presence of a good man, think all the time how you may learn to equal him. In the presence of a bad man, turn your gaze within!
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